Reference Architecture of the Portuguese Mantis Pilot

Introduction

The MANTIS Steel Bending Machine pilot aims at providing the use case owner – ADIRA – a worldwide remote maintenance service to its customers. The main goal is to improve its services by making available new maintenance capabilities with reduced costs, reduce response time, avoiding rework and allowing for better maintenance activities planning.

To this purpose existing ADIRA’s machines (starting with their high end machine model – the Greenbender) will be augmented with extra sensors, which together with information collected from existing sensors will be sent to the cloud to be analyzed. Results made available by the analysis process will be presented to machine operators or maintainers through a HMI interface.

Adira – Greenbender GB-22040

A number of partners are involved into the development and testing of the modules, which regard the communication middleware (ISEP, UNINOVA), data processing and analytics activities (INESC, ISEP), the HMI applications (ISEP), and a stakeholder providing a machine to be enhanced with the MANTIS innovations (ADIRA).

System Architecture

The distributed system being built responds to a reference architecture that is composed by a number of modules, the latter grouped into 4 logical blocks: the Machine under analysis, Data Analysis module, Visualization module, and the Middleware supporting inter-module communications.

architecture of the maintenance system for MANTIS

Machine

Data regarding the machine under analysis are collected by means of sensors, which integrate with the machine itself. This logical block consists thus of data sources that will be used for failure detection, prognosis and diagnosis. This set of data sources comprises an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, data generated by the machine’s Computer Numerical Controller (CNC) and the safety programmable logical controller (PLC).

Middleware

This logical block operates through two basic modules. The first is the MANTIS Embedded PC, which is basically an application that can run on a low cost computer (like a Raspeberry Pi) or directly on the CNC (if powerful enough). This module is responsible for collecting the data from the CNC I/O and transmitting it to the Data Analysis engine for processing and is implemented as a communication API. When based on an external computer, this module also connects to the new wireless MANTIS sensors placed on the machine using Bluetooth Low Energy protocol (BLE). Communications are then supported by the RabbitMQ message oriented middleware, which takes care of proper routing of messages between peers. This middleware handles both AMQP and MQTT protocols to communicate between nodes.

The I/O module is used in order to extract raw information from the machine sensors which is collected by the existing PLC, made available on the Windows-based numerical controller through shared memory and then written to files. Our software collects sensor data from these files, thus completely isolating the MANTIS applications from the numerical controller’s application and from the PLC.

Data Analysis

This logical block takes care of Data Analysis and Prediction, and it exploits three main modules. The first is a set of prediction models used for the detection, prognosis and diagnosis of the machine failures. The second is an API that allows clients to request predictions from the models, and that can respond to different paradigms such as REST or message-queue based. Finally, the third module is a basic ETL subsystem (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) that is responsible for acquiring, preparing and recording the data that will be used for model generation, selection and testing. This last module is also used to process the analytics request data as the same model generation transformations are also required for prediction.

Visualization

This logical block consists of two modules, the human machine interface (HMI) and the Intelligent Maintenance DSS. The HMI is designed to be a web-based mobile application, and to be accessed via the network from any computer or tablet. The HMI is developed to work in two different modes, depending on which kind of user is accessing it. In fact, the HMI is developed to support two user types, the data analyst and the maintenance manager, allowing both of them to analyze the machine’s status, record failure and diagnostics related data. Moreover, the data analysis HMI provides an interface with the data analyst, allowing the consultation and analysis of data and results. On the other hand, the maintenance management HMI allows for consulting predicted events and suggested maintenance actions.

The second module is an Intelligent Maintenance DSS, which uses a Knowledge Base that uses diagnosis, prediction models and the data sent by sensors. On top of this Knowledge Base there is a Rule based Reasoning Engine that includes all the rules that are necessary to deduce new knowledge that helps the maintenance crew to diagnose failures.

Ongoing work

The work performed so far is well advanced and an integration event will occur in the near future where the interconnection between all systems will be tested and validated.

The demonstrator being built, will be evaluated according to the following criteria: prediction model performance (live data sets will be compared to model generation test sets) and the applications usability (the user should access the required information easily, in order to facilitate failure detection and diagnosis).

This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 662189. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Austria, United Kingdom, Hungary, Slovenia, Germany.